Left wanting
Astros finish 4-for-29 with runners in scoring position in four home losses to Nats
George Springer and Co. stranded too many runners against the Nats.
Before he caught a bullpen combustion, Robinson Chirinos created a scene so confusing yet so emblematic of his team’s World Series swoon. He came to the plate in the second inning of Game 7. Max Scherzer stood on the ropes, already down a run with the Astros threatening to score more. The crowd reached a crescendo.
Two were on, and none were out. Scherzer surrendered missile after missile, inviting wonder whether this second inning could be his last. Yuli Gurriel began the frame with a solo home run into the Crawford Boxes. Yordan Alvarez and Carlos Correa struck consecutive singles harder than 104 mph off their bats. Scherzer was fooling few, but Washington’s bullpen remained dormant.
Chirinos arrived with the most damning of directives from his manager. On the first pitch Scherzer threw, Chirinos squared to bunt. He popped the fastball up behind home plate. Catcher Yan Gomes corralled it for an easy first out. Chirinos reacted in disgust. A.J. Hinch wrote the result on his scorecard inside the dugout.
“I got a bunt from A.J. and was trying to get a bunt down,” Chirinos said after the game. “It was my fault for not moving the guys (to) second and third base.”
In an eight-year major league career spanning 2,043 plate appearances, Chirinos had executed 13 sacrifice bunts. As a team, the Astros totaled 10 during the regular season, a span of six months when slugging for extra bases belied any thought of small ball.
“That kind of started everything right there,” Chirinos said of his bunt. “We left, what, 10 guys on base tonight? When you do that against a team like that, most of the time you’re going to be on the losing side.”
Chirinos was correct. The Astros stranded 10 baserunners in a 6-2 loss to the Nationals, a fitting end to a postseason permeated with one large problem.
The indelible image of Houston’s World Series loss was not Will Harris’ well-executed cutter that clanked off the right-field foul pole but a damning propensity to waste baserunners and fail in clutch situations.
Josh Reddick grounded out to first base and George Springer struck a liner right to Juan Soto in left field, finishing a waste of momentum that Chirinos started.
The Astros played 10 times at Minute Maid Park in the postseason. They scored 3.5 runs per game and stranded 74 baserunners. In 72 at-bats with runners in scoring position, they mustered 14 hits, good for a .194 batting average.
No player was absolved of the anemia. Jose Altuve and Michael Brantley squandered a similar fifth-inning situation against Stephen Strasburg in Game 6. Correa struck out nine times in the World Series. As the go-ahead run in Game 7, Alvarez grounded out in the seventh inning.
“It’s hard. I don’t want to give you the standard answer,” Hinch said, “but there’s times where it was chasing out of the zone; there were times where we hit the ball really hard. There were times where they beat us. There’s times where we could have been trying to do too much. Across the gamut of reasons.”
However confusing Hinch’s choice to bunt Chirinos seemed, it was at least rooted in recency and logic. In their four World Series home losses to the Nationals, Houston stranded 36 men and went 4-for-29 with runners in scoring position.
The Astros’ offense was a shell of itself in the postseason, especially inside Minute Maid Park. That it strung together Correa and Alvarez’s two singles was a rarity, not the norm. Asking the lineup to deliver two clutch hits in a row, when it got three in the three home World Series games that preceded it, seemed too much to ask.
Though nowhere near as pronounced, problems were apparent in the regular season. The Astros had a pedestrian .268 regular-season batting average with runners in scoring position — 10th among the 30 major league lineups.
They relied almost solely on the home run for any production, a plan that proved unsustainable against three terrific pitching staffs. Seventy-four of the Astros’ franchise-record 288 homers came with runners in scoring position. No major league team had more.
“It’s just our reality. That’s how it was,” Hinch said after Game 7. “You go through stretches like that during the season, and it kind of gets looked past. But you go through it in the World Series …”
“Now, I would rather have the opportunity and fail than never have anybody on base, and we’re talking about pure dominance by their pitching staff. You’ve got to keep trying to give yourself opportunities. It doesn’t feel good when you leave all those guys on base.”